whatever is … pure

One of my girls favourite treats is apple juice. So much so that when we make a list in the school holidays of of fun things to do, “Drink apple juice” always makes it on there.

We love to get our juicer out and make the juice ourself, watching the fruit whizz round and round and the liquid ooze out. Did you know it takes a lot of apples to get a decent amount of juice? And there is a fair bit of extraneous pulp left over. Oh and it takes effort and time.

But it is pure juice, nothing added.

Which makes me wonder about the effort required to think on “what is pure” as we are asked to in Philippians 4.

pure: not mixed with any extraneous or dissimilar materials, elements; free from tainting or polluting matter; free from moral taint or defilement; of unmixed descent.

One translation of this verse uses the word “authentic”. We live in a world that is obsessed with how something looks, and not the real inner product. You just have to walk through the supermarket to see that.

At the supermarket it is very tricky to find “pure apple juice”. Even though the front of the product may indicate it. When you look at the label at the back you find that the pure apple juice only constitutes 20% or even 5% of the product. It has been watered down, or had sugar added, or some sort of additive to enable it to keep.

The apple juice we make at home doesn’t look fantastic, it has a kind of creamy colour, not the shiny bronze most people associate with apple juice. And maybe that’s the key, authenticity doesn’t look shiny and beautiful. And it takes effort to get to whatever is pure.

But I have noticed that the more pure apple juice we make at home, the more the girls taste the real stuff, the more they can tell which juices have been watered down or sugared up.

The closer you get to something pure, authentic and real, the easier it is to spot a fake. When spotting fraudulent money, the advice given, is to get a note you know is genuine and then compare.

I don’t know about you but I ponder on my lies a lot. “You are not creative”, “you are not a good mum”, and so many more. But if I saw that for the untruth it is and pondered on the pure truth how might my life and my relationships look different?

What do you know that is genuine? What do you know that is real, authentic and true? How would life feel for you if you spent time thinking on those things? Maybe you’d be better equipped to spot the lies?